Arkady Wajspapir, 96, Is Dead; Escaped Death Camp in Uprising

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Arkady Wajspapir, second from left, with other survivors of the Sobibor death camp at a reunion in 1990. He was a key figure in a 1943 uprising; one of its leaders was Alexander Pechersky, third from left.CreditHolocaust Research Project

By the time Arkady Wajspapir killed a Nazi during the historic uprising at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943, he had endured great misery.

While he was serving in the Soviet Red Army in World War II, his family was killed by Nazis in a massacre near his hometown in Ukraine. And after being seriously wounded in fighting in Kiev, he was taken to a prisoner-of-war hospital and later to a concentration camp in Minsk.

While interned there he was one of 75 prisoners, patients and doctors — all Jewish — who were sent to a separate prison in the woods nearby, where they were confined in dark cells and fed bits of bread.

The survivors were transferred to Sobibor in September 1943. The camp, near the Bug River in eastern Poland, was built in secrecy with a single purpose: to kill all its prisoners — both combatants and civilians, including men, women and children.

By the time it was dismantled in 1943, the death toll was estimated at 250,000, nearly all of them Jews.

Still, Mr. Wajspapir said in the 1984 interview, “we couldn’t imagine that we’d be brought all the way to Poland to be exterminated.”

Mr. Wajspapir, who died at 96 on Jan. 11 in Kiev, escaped the gas chamber when he was chosen on his arrival to be a laborer. Soon he was recruited to join an escape plan that involved killing SS officers and Ukrainian guards in an uprising.

Alexander Pechersky — a fellow Red Army prisoner and a leader of the plot (his surname has also been spelled Petsjerski) — ordered Mr. Wajspapir to kill an SS officer at the camp tailor’s shop. Mr. Pechersky and Mr. Wajspipir had met at the camp in Minsk.

“He didn’t request it,” Mr. Wajspapir, one of the last survivors of the insurrection, said in 1984. “He gave an order. After all, we were soldiers. In a situation like that, everyone knew that orders had to be carried out.”

The uprising began in the late afternoon of Oct. 14. Mr. Wajspapir and another Jewish prisoner, Yehuda Lerner, armed with axes, hid behind a curtain in the shop until their target, Siegfried Graetschus, the German SS officer in charge of the Ukrainian guards, entered. While Graetschus tried on a coat that had been made for him, Mr. Wajspapir, by his account, emerged and attacked him with his ax, striking his head.

“Graetschus let out a scream, did not immediately fall to the ground but tumbled head first because the blow was obviously not forceful enough,” Mr. Wajspapir said in a 1975 article on the website Sobibor Interviews. He and Mr. Lerner then finished off Graetschus.

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A train station stop at the site of the Sobibor death camp in 2016.CreditAnton Denisov/Sputnik, via Associated Press

Interviewed for the film “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s nearly nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust, Mr. Lerner said that he, not Mr. Wajspapir, had struck the first blow. “I split his skull in two,” he said.

Then, to their surprise, he said, a Ukrainian guard (some accounts say it was a second German soldier) walked into the shop, kicked at the blankets covering the body and stepped on one of Graetschus’s hands. When the guard bent over, he said, he and Mr. Wajspapir attacked him with their axes.

“We suddenly felt joy to have succeeded at what we had to do here,” Mr. Lerner said in the film.

Ukrainian guards and nearly a dozen other SS officers were killed in the uprising as the camp, with an estimated 600 prisoners, erupted in chaos. Armed prisoners exchanged gunfire with surviving Germans and Ukrainians, and telephone wires and electrical lines were severed.

“I personally ran by the officers’ quarters to the barbed-wire enclosure,” Mr. Wajspapir said in 1984. “We had to get through barbed wire that was three rows thick.”

About 300 prisoners escaped the camp, but most did not find freedom. Some died or were wounded when they stepped on land mines planted outside the gates. Many others were captured or killed by pursuing Germans.

Thomas Blatt, a teenage prisoner, described the scene for the magazine Jewish Currents in 1978. “Ahead of me, stooped figures, running cautiously,” he said. “We were the last of the fugitives. Down I went a few times, each time thinking I was hit. Each time I got up and ran farther … one hundred yards … fifty more yards … twenty yards … and at last — the forest.”

Mr. Wajspapir was one of the few dozen prisoners who did succeed in the escape. After four days on the run, he said, he crossed the Bug River in Belarus and joined a partisan resistance group before eventually returning to fight for the Red Army in a machine-gun unit. He was discharged in 1946.

Arkady Moishejwicz Wajspapir — whose name has been spelled differently in various accounts — was born on Dec. 23, 1921, in Bobrovy Kut, a Jewish agricultural settlement of about 2,000 people in Ukraine.

He was not yet 20 and had left home to join the Red Army when SS units shot as many as 945 people at Yevgenovka Steppe, near Bobrovy Kut, and threw their bodies into wells.

“Only Jews were murdered there,” Mr. Wajspapir said in a video interview.

Among them were his mother, sister, grandmother, grandfathers, aunts and uncles.

After the war, Mr. Wajspapir trained and worked as an auto mechanic in Ukraine.

Information about his survivors was not available. His wife, Faina Samoylovna, was a teacher, he had two sons, Vadim, an engineer, and Michail, a doctor.

Mr. Wajspipir said the rebellion at the death camp — the subject of books and a television movie, “Escape From Sobibor” (1987), which starred Alan Arkin — succeeded in part because the prisoners had overcome their differences to cooperate.

“There were lots of different people in the camp,” he told the Netherlands institute. “People with different beliefs. People spoke different languages and talked about different matters. And in order to bring all those people together and unite them, a center ground had to be created that appealed to everyone. It was very difficult to organize a collective escape, especially with such mixed company.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Arkady Wajspapir, 96, Sobibor Escapee, Is Dead. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe